> When comparing cluster offerings, seems reasonable, that the additional
> $85-$100 would be factored in to any system/cluster purchase, for at least
> power up/down and reset? This is astonishing, or is there something I'm
> missing in this thread? The technology mentioned isn't really earth
depends on the scale and environment. when I built my first cluster
(started at ~48 nodes), I had controllable power and a serial network for
bios/console. I never actually wired up the latter, and once the system
stabilized, actually removed the controllable power.
for small clusters (<= few racks), neither should really be necessary, since
your hang/crash rate should be very low. if you have quite fat nodes,
the marginal cost becomes negligable, though, and worth the convenience.
for larger clusters (say, >256 nodes), even occasional manual fiddling is
dubious - may still be OK if you have lots of people.
my organization has ~2500 nodes, many remote, and ~5 admins who need to spend
most of their time doing systems/net/storage/web programming, etc. so it's
pretty important to avoid a lot of driving and/or labor-intensive operations...